26.09.1996

Arthouse humanity

John Craig reviews Smoke, Directed by Wayne Wang (USA, 1996)

This is a fairly complex film, but well worth seeing. It centres on the Brooklyn cigar shop run by Auggie Wren, played by Harvey Keitel. Every day, at exactly the same time and exactly the same place, he takes a photograph of the street outside his shop. All sorts of people come into his establishment, including Paul Benjamin (William Hurt), a writer who attempts suicide after the death of his wife but is saved by a black teenager (Harold Perrineau Jr).

This description only skates the surface of the plot, which is not that important to the film. What is more important is that the film is rich in humanity. The last scene of the film is Auggie visiting a blind old lady in a slum area, with a song on the soundtrack containing the line, “You’re innocent when you dream”. The characters are very ordinary and believable, in spite of the fact that several of them are played by well known Hollywood actors and actresses.

The film illustrates an interesting paradox. It is an “arthouse” film with a relatively low budget, and it has not been shown in many cinemas. A film like this is most likely to be seen by people I will call intellectuals, for want of a better word. It is not a film that will appeal to the mass market. Yet it actually bears a resemblance to real life. People actually do live in the small cramped apartments shown in films like this. These streets are not paved with gold.

In contrast, the conventional Hollywood film’s depiction of everyday life has little in common with real existence. Hollywood’s attempts to depict poverty or even ordinary existence are often laughable. American “arthouse” cinema tends to be more like European films, and European cinema has a greater footing in the real world than the average Hollywood production.

This is not to say that Europe is incapable of producing a bad film, or that anything with the “arthouse” label is automatically superior to its ‘mainstream’ commercial rivals. Nor is it enough to judge films simply by their real-life quality. Mass audiences go to the cinema or rent videos in order to forget about life, to indulge in escapism. Probably the ideal approach to film is to see a variety of cinema types, to mix “arthouse” with “blockbuster”. The latter kind of film is usually an exercise in wish fulfilment, but that too can be enjoyable and interesting.

John Craig